From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

Creating the impossible single exposure - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

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Creating the impossible single exposure

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- [Illustrator] There are often situations where it would be impossible to capture the photo that you want in a single frame. And the example that we're going to walk through, we'll see how easy it is to combine two photographs of a lay flat collection of rocks, one photograph of the dry rocks, and then another photograph taken of the wet rocks. Of course, this technique could also just as easily be used in other scenarios like if you had to make two exposures of the same scene, because you were changing the lighting between the exposures. Okay, to open both of these, I have them selected in bridge and I'll choose tools and then Photoshop, and then load files into Photoshop layers. On the layers panel, we can see the top layer is the dry rocks and the bottom layer are the wet rocks. So the key here really is in the process of the photography you want to avoid moving the elements between the exposures. And in this case, I photograph the rocks dry first because I knew that getting them wet might also ruin the background. So I'm going to position the dry rocks below the wet rocks in the stacking order, in the layers panel. And then on the wet rocks layer, I'm just going to click to add a layer mask at the bottom of the layers panel. We can see as I toggle on and off the visibility that everything is indeed in registration. So this makes it very easy for me to see which rocks I prefer from each layer. I'll go ahead and tap the B key to select the brush tool. And then it's up to you as to what the opacity is that you would want to set. If I tap zero, then I'm going to be painting with black, which will completely hide a rock. So for example, this wet rock on top. If I paint over this now, then we will only see a 100% of the dry rock below. But if I were to tap the five key to change the opacity to 50% and paint in the rock in the upper right, now I'm getting a mixture of 50% of the wet rock and 50% of the dry rock. So it's just a matter of toggling on and off the visibility of the layer and then painting either once or twice with varying levels of opacity, until you reach the combination where you have hidden the rocks that you don't want from that top layer and are revealing the rocks underneath. So in this case, there's just a few more that I might want to hide the wet versions of them to just bring back a little bit of detail. But overall, I really did like the effect of the water on most of those rocks. All right, I might just do a partial rock there that might also enable us to get a little bit more dimension on those rocks. So the next time you need to combine images, just make sure that they're set up in the way that you want them first, then photograph them, make your changes, photograph them again, and use layer masks in Photoshop to paint in and out the areas to make the image look its best.

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